Writing Fiction by Installment

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Private Asylum – A Poem

There are never any images in my mind.
Only words.
Or more specifically the shadows of words.
You don’t understand.
I am not a living soul.
Or a living man.
Just a ruined afterthought.

We step outside and into
our private asylum.
A strangling maze strips
us and closes
in
all about.

It’s raining.
I pull up an umbrella and under it
we listen to the water fall.
The puddles freeze.

You recall how one time on a drive as a child the sunlight
came through the windshield
of your father’s truck
bathing the cabin in a sickly whiteness
and highlighting the deep cracks and crevices
on the skin of his left hand
which gripped the steering wheel in a lazy confidence,
slightly off center,

to the right.
“There was this customonial boundary
that I became aware of, then,” you tell me. “A limitation
imposed in all of us by design.”

I become frightened by this
realization
and would shut my eyes
but fear losing you if I should.

“And how this barrier is real.
How it roots an eternal
consciousness
and separates our perception.
It’s a garden that exists in the paradise
of a scorched earth.
There is a beauty in how
ridiculously
desperate it is.”

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